The Blue Monkey Review

Unemployment and low wages obviously plague the region. I've mentioned before that professionals, even physicians, have monthly salaries in the hundreds of euros. Housing is chronically in short supply. Most people live in apartments here, and you can see apartment blocs everywhere. Some have the dull, gray concrete look of Communist-era worker housing. Some blocs, like mine, are in pastel colors (though often some of the plaster has fallen off--and, by the way, my bloc of apartments is known as Palestina, "because of all the problems there" according to Janko.). My apartment, or flat, is quite nice--it is about the size of a lodge that the girls and I stayed in near Glacier this summer. Sitting room, kitchen/dining room, bathroom and bedroom. The computer and desk, where I'm sitting now, are in what must have been meant for a pantry. For me, this is plenty. But not only do whole families live in apartments the same size as mine, their grown children with spouses also sometimes live with them there.

My life hardly qualifies under the category of hardship. My Fulbright stipend allows me to rent this flat from Najo, who works at the steel plant here. (To make the extra money, Najo rents a room from friends so he can rent the flat to me.) But most things that I want to do here take a little extra thought and effort. So, for instance, shopping has become one of the main pursuits of my life. I go out almost every day. Little shops are everywhere. None of these will have everything that you want, even in the single category of groceries. The largest market in town would fit into the video rental section of most Wal-Marts, and although it has a counter for cheese and meat it does not carry fresh produce. Other shops carry produce, but there is no way to predict which produce or in what condition. So, you keep shopping. I had to go to half a dozen stores before I finally found facial tissues (what they call Kleenex, in Mexico). Every little shop has a rack at the front where you can leave your shopping bag from the other stores so that stuff you've already bought doesn't get mixed with stuff you will buy.

Practice improves your performance, in shopping as in most things. The best kiwifruit that I've found are sold right on my road, by a man who works out of his car. Yesterday I bought three large ripe kiwi from him, the kind that you find at Giant Eagle only when you are lucky. He weighed them on a scale suspended from his hatchback. When he told me the price it was one of those unusual moments when I understood what he said, but I didn't believe what I'd heard: thirty euro-cents, about 40 cents in American.

My best example of the need for persistence in the Darwinian struggle to find the stuff you want is my search for a heater. A single electric space heater provides most of the heat in my apartment. That works for the living and dining area, but does nothing to modify the cool air at the other end of the apartment in the bedroom. I spent several days sleeping on the couch while I hunted for a heater during the day. There are quite a few electrical appliance places in Niksic, but most of these seem to specialize in lighting fixtures. Or, they had heaters that didn't suit my needs. Finally, though, I found a large store with a variety of electrical appliances. And, in fact, the place had just the kind of heater I needed for only a little more than I expected to pay. But when I told the sales clerk that I wanted it, she fired back some questions in Serbian. What I think she wanted to know was, "How large an area do you want to heat?" We will just have to hope that is what she asked, because otherwise God only knows what she must have made of my response, which was to more or less pace off an approximation of the area in her store. She gave a look that seemed to say she understood, and then she refused to sell the heater to me. That much, at least, was clear. Why? My best suppositions are either a) this heater won't heat that large an area or b) we don't have this in stock. (Just so you are not worrying about me, I found another heater shortly thereafter, and I have now occupied the bedroom.)

I also feel that I'm participating in the life of the people here when I do laundry. Like most people living in Palestina and other apartment blocs in town, I have a clothes washer right in my apartment, in the bathroom. Of course, I'm only doing laundry for one person, not for two families. So once I figured out how to work the settings on my machine, everything went smoothly. To dry clothes, however, everyone in Montenegro seems to use the air drying method. Again, no problem. My mother dried all of our clothes that way for years when I was a child. However, I was a child in southern California where it didn't rain and where it never fell below freezing. But since I arrived in Niksic, the temperature has only rarely crept above freezing, and my laundry day was not that special day. I could pretty well predict what would happen, that my clothes, hanging in the wind on a line on my balcony, would freeze solid. But I left them there in the hope that some force of nature unclear or unknown to me would transfer moisture from my garments to the Montenegrin atmosphere. This was a case, though, where I actually already knew all of the relevant physical laws. My clothes froze solid, turning into stiff flags marking the American occupation of one flat in Palestina.

As with most things in the Balkans, there is a way around. My synthetics dried pretty easily in the bathroom, though I didn't have a place to hang up everything. So I strung dental floss from the shower-head holder to a convenient hook to make a drying line for my socks. The space heater in my living room has a nice flat top. It worked well as a kind of drying board for the heavier fabrics. By the end of my wash day, all my clothes were more or less dry. Nema problema.